444 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1939 



furnishings include a palette for mixing paints and a few pottery 

 smoothers (pi. 10, fig. 2). The bodies, mostly from the cemetery 

 of level XVIII, were placed, with but one exception, in a contracted 

 position (pi. 11), and this is true of the woman who had been 

 placed in her grave holding her child in her right arm. The tiny 

 bones of the infant are barely visible in the photograph (pi. 10, 

 fig. 1). The single extended burial was found in level XVII 

 (pi. 9, fig. 2). Since the position of the body is almost invariably 

 a distinctive racial custom, it appears that this one departure rep- 

 resents a stranger, very likely from the south. Besides pottery, 

 the commonest grave furnishings were pendants and beads (pi. 9, 

 fig. 1) of limestone, shell, and obsidian. 



Numerous remains of the later Obeid period at Gawra were found 

 in a well sunk down from level XIV. By far the most valuable 

 of these finds were seal impressions on clay, which came up liter- 

 ally in basketfuls. Seals afford a representative picture of con- 

 temporary art, and we can hardly learn too much about the art 

 of a remote prehistoric period. Of special int,erest among the 

 finds from the well is the skull of a saluki, or oriental gazelle hound 

 (pi. 12, fig. 2). This swift and graceful breed of hunting dog is 

 to this very day a favorite with the Kurds and Arabs, to whom 

 any other kind of dog is the uncleanest of animals. The breeding 

 of salukis proves to have been a very ancient sport indeed. As far 

 back as Gawra XVI this hound was depicted on seals, together 

 with the animals which he was used to pursue (pi. 12, fig. 1). 



Level XX brings us down to a true Halaf settlement. This 

 fact is established by the pottery of the stratum, and by its char- 

 acteristic pendants, some of which bear the design of the swastika, 

 obviously an ancient and purely oriental symbol (pi. 3, fig. 1). 

 Identical remains were uncovered in the season of 1936-37, in the 

 side cut at the eastern edge of the mound. Like the levels in the 

 cut, Gawra XX contains no pottery of the Obeid-Samarra type. 

 It follows that the twentieth stratum corresponds to the top layer 

 of the sounding. We have thus at last a correct count of the total 

 number of building levels which Gawra had stored up for modern 

 archeology. Adding the 5 other Halaf layers revealed in the sound- 

 ing, and the one underlying pre-Halafian deposit, to the 20 occu- 

 pations sliced down from the top of the mound, we obtain the as- 

 tounding figure of 26, which represents so many distinct stages in 

 the progress of prehistoric and early historic man. 



The long ascent had begun with a neolithic settlement, which 

 used a brittle orange ware with wavy red decoration, such as has 

 been found also in the fourteenth stratum of Judeideh, in north- 

 ern Syria. The first inhabitants of Gawra were thus a group that 



